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Thursday, 22 October 2009

Air New Zealand plays GrabAMurderer for laughs [updated]

The double standard of poster boys and propaganda continues (see here and here for earlier posts).

A while back Powershop featured “humorous” pictures of bloggers and media types dressed as that loveable rogue Che Guevara. Oh, how we all laughed to see Russell Brown and Gordon Campbell dressed as the chap who imprisoned homosexuals, murdered his political enemies, and declared "A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall!" (And by “The Wall” he wasn’t meaning a Pink Floyd album, he was meaning something his revolutionary firing squads would put you against).

But how much laughter would there have been if Powershop had dressed them up as Brownshirts or SS Guards? The free pass given to one particular breed of homicidal totalitarians continues.

And it continues today on Air New Zealand’s Grab-A-Seat website. I’m sure Air New Zealand wouldn’t countenance displaying a Nazi propaganda poster extolling “Blood, Soil and Sacrifice” and copies of Mein Kampf as an inducement to buy seats on their flights, but right there on their website exhorting you to fly the friendly skies to Hong Kong is this image ripped directly from a Maoist propaganda poster from the Cultural Revolution – you know, that fun time in China when thought police ruled and around 7,731,000 people were brutally murdered by for not following the diktats of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which our peasant friend clutches to his breast:

Just the sort of image you’d expect a national airline to use to sell tickets to China today, wouldn’t you think?

I’d say that somebody in their advertising department clearly needs shooting . . . but I might be misunderstood.

UPDATE: Liberty Scott spots another “anomaly.” If BNP kiwis are odious, because of their vile racist and anti-immigrant views, then why aren’t modern-day adherents to the ideology that killed over 100,000,000 people?

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